Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption.

Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these controversies often lead and on the charges--"absurdity," "irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"--that typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and language theory.

Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism, significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more generally.

When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in the late 1970s, he vowed to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” More than three decades later, China’s efforts to modernize have yielded something very different from the working people’s paradise Deng envisioned: an incipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring income inequality, and growing social tensions. China’s Crony Capitalism traces the origins of China’s present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reforms from the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership.

Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned property—in particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusion among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly.

Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath China’s facade of ever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay.

A pathbreaking history of early modern education argues that Europe’s oldest university, often seen as a bastion of traditionalism, was in fact a vibrant site of intellectual innovation and cultural exchange.

The University of Bologna was among the premier universities in medieval Europe and an international magnet for students of law. However, a long-standing historiographical tradition holds that Bologna—and Italian university education more broadly—foundered in the early modern period. On this view, Bologna’s curriculum ossified and its prestige crumbled, due at least in part to political and religious pressure from Rome. Meanwhile, new ways of thinking flourished instead in humanist academies, scientific societies, and northern European universities.

David Lines offers a powerful counternarrative. While Bologna did decline as a center for the study of law, he argues, the arts and medicine at the university rose to new heights from 1400 to 1750. Archival records show that the curriculum underwent constant revision to incorporate contemporary research and theories, developed by the likes of René Descartes and Isaac Newton. From the humanities to philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine, teaching became more systematic and less tied to canonical texts and authors. Theology, meanwhile, achieved increasing prominence across the university. Although this religious turn reflected the priorities and values of the Catholic Reformation, it did not halt the creation of new scientific chairs or the discussion of new theories and discoveries. To the contrary, science and theology formed a new alliance at Bologna.

The University of Bologna remained a lively hub of cultural exchange in the early modern period, animated by connections not only to local colleges, academies, and libraries, but also to scholars, institutions, and ideas throughout Europe.

Dynamic Syntax is a formal model of utterance description that attempts to articulate and substantiate the claim that human linguistic knowledge is essentially the ability to process language in context. The model provides an explicit demonstration of how interpretation is built up incrementally from the information provided by the words as they are encountered. Drawing from a range of analyses of natural language data, the authors use formal definitions, step-by-step derivations, and detailed lexical definitions to illustrate this new form of syntactic analysis and to show how the model can be applied to a broad range of constructions and languages.

The importance of the rich corpus of “Masters Literature” that developed in early China since the fifth century BCE has long been recognized. But just what are these texts? Scholars have often approached them as philosophy, but these writings have also been studied as literature, history, and anthropological, religious, and paleographic records. How should we translate these texts for our times?

This book explores these questions through close readings of seven examples of Masters Literature and asks what proponents of a “Chinese philosophy” gained by creating a Chinese equivalent of philosophy and what we might gain by approaching these texts through other disciplines, questions, and concerns. What happens when we remove the accrued disciplinary and conceptual baggage from the Masters Texts? What neglected problems, concepts, and strategies come to light? And can those concepts and strategies help us see the history of philosophy in a different light and engender new approaches to philosophical and intellectual inquiry? By historicizing the notion of Chinese philosophy, we can, the author contends, answer not only the question of whether there is a Chinese philosophy but also the more interesting question of the future of philosophical thought around the world.

Efficiency. Innovation. Results. Accountability. These, advocates claim, are the fruits of performance management. In recent decades government organizations have eagerly embraced the performance model—but the rush to reform has not delivered as promised.

Drawing on research from state and federal levels, Moynihan illustrates how governments have emphasized some aspects of performance management—such as building measurement systems to acquire more performance data—but have neglected wider organizational change that would facilitate the use of such information. In his analysis of why and how governments in the United States have made the move to performance systems, Moynihan identifies agency leadership, culture, and resources as keys to better implementation, goal-based learning, and improved outcomes.

How do governments use the performance information generated under performance systems? Moynihan develops a model of interactive dialogue to highlight how performance data, which promised to optimize decision making and policy change for the public's benefit, has often been used selectively to serve the interests of particular agencies and individuals, undermining attempts at interagency problem solving and reform.

A valuable resource for public administration scholars and administrators, The Dynamics of Performance Management offers fresh insight into how government organizations can better achieve their public service goals.

Brian Skyrms constructs a theory of “dynamic deliberation” and uses it to investigate rational decision-making in cases of strategic interaction. This illuminating book will be of great interest to all those in many disciplines who use decision theory and game theory to study human behavior and thought.

Skyrms begins by discussing the Bayesian theory of individual rational decision and the classical theory of games, which at first glance seem antithetical in the criteria used for determining action. In his effort to show how methods for dealing with information feedback can be productively combined, the author skillfully leads us through the mazes of equilibrium selection, the Nash equilibria for normal and extensive forms, structural stability, causal decision theory, dynamic probability, the revision of beliefs, and, finally, good habits for decision.

The author provides many clarifying illustrations and a handy appendix called “Deliberational Dynamics on Your Personal Computer.” His powerful model has important implications for understanding the rational origins of convention and the social contract, the logic of nuclear deterrence, the theory of good habits, and the varied strategies of political and economic behavior.

Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making it difficult to stay abreast of advances within even the smallest subdisciplines. Traditional approaches to the study of science, such as the history and philosophy of science, involve closely reading a relatively small set of journal articles. And yet many questions benefit from casting a wider net: Is most scientific change gradual or revolutionary? What are the key sources of scientific novelty? Over the past several decades, a massive effort to digitize the academic literature and equip computers with algorithms that can distantly read and analyze a digital database has taken us one step closer to answering these questions. The Dynamics of Science brings together a diverse array of contributors to examine the largely unexplored computational frontiers of history and philosophy of science. Together, they reveal how tools and data from automated textual analysis, or machine “reading,” combined with methods and models from game theory and cultural evolutionary theory, can begin to answer fundamental questions about the nature and history of science.

The Dynamics of Soviet Politics is the result of reflective and thorough research into the centers of a system whose inner debates are not open to public discussion and review, a system which tolerates no public opposition parties, no prying congressional committees, and no investigative journalists to ferret out secrets. The expert authors offer an inside view of the workings of this closed system a view rarely found elsewhere in discussions of Soviet affairs. Their work, building as it does on the achievements of Soviet studies over the last thirty years, is firmly rooted in established knowledge and covers sufficient new ground to enable future studies of Soviet politics and social practices to move ahead unencumbered by stereotypes, sensationalism, or mystification.

Among the subjects included are: attitudes toward leadership and a general discussion of the uses of political history; the dramatic cycles of officially permitted dissent; the legitimacy of leadership within a system that has no constitutional provision for succession; the gradual adoption of Western-inspired administrative procedures and "systems management"; a study of group competition, and bureaucratic bargaining; Khrushchev's virgin-lands experiment and its subsequent retrenchment; the apolitical values of adolescents; the problems of integrating Central Asia into the Soviet system; a history of peaceful coexistence and its current importance in Soviet foreign policy priorities, and, finally, an overview of Soviet government as an extension of prerevolutionary oligarchy, with an emphasis on adaptation to political change.

Something is not right in the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The unease is less evident to Tom, the manipulator, than to the socially marginal Huck. The trouble is most dramatically revealed when Huck, whose “sivilized” Christian conscience is developing, faces the choice between betraying his black friend Jim—which he believes is his moral duty—and letting him escape, as his heart tells him to do.

“Bad faith” is Forrest Robinson's name for the dissonance between what we profess to believe, how we act, and how we interpret our own behavior. There is bad faith in the small hypocrisies of daily living, but Robinson has a much graver issue in mind—namely slavery, which persisted for nearly a century in a Christian republic founded on ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. Huck, living on the fringes of small-town society, recognizes Jim's humanity and understands the desperateness of his plight. Yet Huck is white, a member of the dominant class; he is at once influenced and bewildered by the contradictions of bad faith in the minds of his fully acculturated contemporaries.

Robinson stresses that “bad faith” is more than a theme with Mark Twain; his bleak view of man's social nature (however humorously expressed), his nostalgia, his ambivalence about the South, his complex relationship to his audience, can all be traced back to an awareness of the deceits at the core of his culture—and he is not himself immune. This deeply perceptive book will be of interest to students of American literature and history and to anyone concerned with moral issues.

The past decade has been characterized by remarkable advances in meteorological observation, computing techniques, and data-visualization technology. However, the benefit of these advances can only be fully realized with the introduction of a systematic, applied approach to meteorological education that allows well-established theoretical concepts to be applied to modernized observational and numerical datasets.

The department of Puno in southern Peru is an area oriented to livestock and agricultural production, peopled by an Indian peasant mass and a dominant minority of culturally Westernized mestizos. A small but growing hybrid group, the cholos, bridged the cultural gap and collaborated with dissident merchant elements within the mestizo group to challenge the economic, social, and political order of the altiplano (high plateau) system. Politics in the Altiplano analyzes the sources of conflict and political change in the plural society as it underwent socioeconomic development through a period of recurring natural disasters.

In the period under study (1956–1966), a prolonged drought precipitated a series of crises. The mismanagement of American aid, sent to the suffering peasants, became a national cause célèbre. As migration to Peru’s coastal cities reached large-scale proportions, several peasant movements were launched in the department. To rechannel local discontent, an autonomous development corporation was created for Puno by the Peruvian Congress. This, plus the institution of local elections in 1963, provided ample opportunity for the coalition of dissident mestizos, cholos, and peasants to pursue their “revolutionary” goals.

A rivalry between two major towns, Puno (the department’s capital) and Juliaca (the commercial center), furthered the conflict between conservative mestizos and the peasant-cholo movement. Juliaca’s attempt to secede from the department in November 1965 set off a series of violent strikes and counterstrikes in both cities. Intervention from the national level by government troops put an end to the crisis for the time being. But the continued need for land reform in the department, combined with institutionalized means for political participation, kept the peasants mobilized and the atmosphere of conflict alive.

Scale and Scope is Alfred Chandler’s first major work since his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Visible Hand. Representing ten years of research into the history of the managerial business system, this book concentrates on patterns of growth and competitiveness in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, tracing the evolution of large firms into multinational giants and orienting the late twentieth century’s most important developments.

This edition includes the entire hardcover edition with the exception of the Appendix Tables.